Comment by ethin

Okay, so let's say we decide to go through with "banning the algorithm" (whatever that is). Let's say this is actually implemented, as naively as everybody seems to think this issue is. What happens to:

* The homepage of Reddit * The YouTube homepage * The federated timeline of my Mastodon instance * The algorithmic feed that Bluesky uses (which is more customizable than Facebooks)

I could sit here and go on and on. All of these, in one way or another, are algorithmic, in the strict definition of an algorithm. So, are you also saying that the federated timeline of my Mastodon instance shouldn't exist? I mean, in a sense, that's an "algorithmic feed". How am I supposed to find interesting users who I should follow then? By word of Mouth? Because that's not going to work. By forums or awesome lists? Now you've just created yet another kind of echo chamber because what I find depends on what forums or awesome lists I frequent, and that leads to me only seeing what I want to see. Which... Doesn't really solve the root problem that "banning the algorithm" would try to solve. If anything, it makes it worse. Instead of everyone being able to look at alternate viewpoints/ideas, they are suddenly restricted to only those viewpoints/ideas which they want to see/read/hear/whatever. In something like Email that's fine: I only want to see emails for mailing lists and such I've subscribed to for example. On something that is supposed to be a social network, federated or no, that... Kind of destroys the "social network" part.

Like maybe I'm just misunderstanding what everybody means when they talk about "banning the algorithm" and "getting rid of the toxic sludge" but the law (the first amendment) prohibits viewpoint discrimination. Being "content neutral" isn't possible (everything is biased in some manner). So I guess what trips me up is: how exactly would you word the law and thread the needle fine enough that you would only ban the kind of feeds Facebook uses for example, without also causing a ton of second, third, fourth, and maybe even fifth-order effects far beyond what anybody intended to do? And how do you do that without violating the first amendment in the process? Maybe I'm missing something critical here or something, but from all the studies I've looked at that indicate that screen time and such is not actually as harmful as the narrative would like you to think, this looks to me like a solution in search of a problem, and a solution that would have consequences that people haven't thought about.